Source: Forbes
Author: Mark A. Cohen, CEO & Founder of Legal Mosaic and Executive Chairman at The Digital Legal Exchange.
For those awaiting transformation of the legacy legal delivery model, it’s been a long, frustrating wait punctuated by high hopes and dashed expectations. The Economist raised legal transformation expectations in a 2011 article featuring Clearspire, a revolutionary law firm and legal services company founded in Spring 2008. Clearespire reimagined the delivery of legal services from the client perspective. Its custom-built, integrated technology platform, fixed-fee billing model that aligned the economic interests of clients-firm-lawyers, and on-demand client access to data (work product of all firm matters undertaken on its behalf), were among its many innovations. Clearspire captured the imagination of the industry, but failed to achieve financial success.
A few years later, hopes for transformation were again buoyed.
“Legal delivery is ripe for transformation, and capital infusion will scale and consolidate the fragmented legal industry.” That was the conclusion of a 2019 Forbes article that examined the causes of an investment boom in the legal industry and what it portended. Several factors were proffered including:
- Business, not service providers, is driving the direction of legal delivery
- Broadening disaggregation of legal service delivery from the practice of law
- A proliferation of new providers (a/k/a “ALSP’s”) and market traction
- New technology, processes, and diverse skillsets
Technological advances have produced existential business challenges as well as created opportunities. The paradoxical duality of challenge and opportunity has been magnified by the astonishing speed of technological development. Chat GPT’s public unveiling occurred in late 2022, and Gen AI has quickly transitioned from experimentation to adoption and transformation. Its capabilities continue to expand as tens of billions of dollars are poured into it and the data that advances its “education” and application to specific industries and sectors.
Agentic AI’s autonomous, proactive, and multitasking capability holds great promise (and concurrent challenge) for holistic, rapid decision making. That is critical in a fluid business environment marked by a multiplicity of interconnected variables and real-time adaptation. At the same time, Agentic AI poses a weighty burden on humans to design and implement it responsibly, ethically, creatively, compassionately and for the betterment of the human race. The legal function must understand the technology to be among those making such weighty decisions.
Read the full article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcohen1/2025/01/27/legal-transformation-mirage-turned-reality/
